A Day In The Bus:

Policy report and recommendations through an anecdote.

On a hot summer day I ran 500 metres to catch a bus, especially the last 20 metres were like an Olympic final race, because I thought I would reach the bus stop before the bus stopped but the bus stopped ten metres after the bus stop. I was just in time to get onto the bus .While I kept my foot on the footboard the bus started to move.I was fortunate as I was young enough to run.What about the old lady who could barely walk without support ? Survival of the fittest I thought. While I stepped into the bus I was expecting a comfortable seat to sit by the window. What I got was the opposite of it or even worse. I barely got a place to stand in that heavily overcrowded bus.I was surrounded by men young ,middle-aged and old. All of us held on to a rod, bar ,seat or a pole. I couldn’t even move from where I was standing, it was mission impossible to take money out of my wallet to pay for the ticket as I have to hold on to the pole or I will lose my balance and fall down. We can easily say that India is a country with a huge population and these scenes are common in any part of India. But this is largely because of the inefficiency of transportation systems in India . Most cities don’t have a separate lane for the busses to stop at the bus stops. There is a huge disparity between number of people travelling in busses and number of busses available . But these aren’t the most shocking factors of the pubic transport System in India. We always think that the public sector transport corporations run at a loss because they offer tickets at a lower price than the private sector. But it is not true. Among all the chaos in the bus I was most shocked with ticket prices in the government bus. The previous day I had travelled on the same route in a private bus and the price in the government bus was more than twice the amount charged by the private bus. Even with such higher prices the public sector transport corporations are running at a loss. The transport system of our country is in a mess. While the government is pumping thousands of crores into an airline which serves only the rich , why can’t it properly channelise funds into providing bus services to villages and give them proper accessibility by building good quality roads? bureaucratic inefficiency has led our country to this unhealthy state .When a private transport company (bus or flight) can run at a profit and offer relatively low prices to it’s travellers, why has the government failed people? the government has to answer the questions of the people whom it has betrayed for the past many years. The people who have voted the governments to power every five years , the common people who barely earn a few hundred rupees .The government has exploited the most vulnerable people of the society . We at HEADLINE demand real answers for the weak in the society.

Coming up with answers.

(TRANSPORT PART 2 coming up in January 2018 )

–HEADLINE’S POLICY REPORTER

Headline’s policy report is a report on the policies of the government and its agencies.